Our Jury
Michael Lewin, jury chair, is one of America’s most foremost concert pianists, winning over audiences in 30 countries with playing of “majestic power and searing emotion.” (The London Times). His career was launched with top prizes in the Franz Liszt International Competition, the American Pianists Association Award and the William Kapell International Piano Competition. His recordings have won a Grammy Award and a Roundglass Music Award.
He has appeared as orchestral soloist with the Netherlands Philharmonic, Cairo Symphony, China National Radio Orchestra, Bucharest Philharmonic, Youth Orchestra of the Americas, State Symphony of Greece, Moscow Chamber Orchestra, the Boston Pops, and the Phoenix, Indianapolis, Miami, North Carolina, West Virginia, Nevada, New Orleans, Colorado, Guadalajara, and Puerto Rico Symphonies. Solo appearances include New York’s Lincoln Center, London’s Wigmore Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall, Taiwan’s National Concert Hall, Hong Kong’s City Hall Theatre, Holland’s Muziekcentrum, Moscow’s Great Hall, the Athens Megaron, the National Gallery of Art, the Newport, Ravinia and Spoleto Festivals and PBS Television. His extensive repertoire includes over 40 piano concertos, with particular interest in the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy and American and Latin American composers.
Mr. Lewin’s award-winning discography on Sono Luminus, Naxos and Centaur includes a pair of acclaimed Debussy recordings entitled “Beau Soir” and “Starry Night”, the complete piano music of Charles T. Griffes, Scarlatti Sonatas Vol. 2 for Naxos, “Michael Lewin plays Liszt,” “A Russian Piano Recital”, “Bamboula!” piano music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, “Piano Phantoms,” “If I Were a Bird” and the 4 Violin Sonatas by William Bolcom with Irina Muresanu.
Michael Lewin is Professor and Head of Piano at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and Classical Music Director for Ethos Music in China. He gives master classes worldwide, directs the Boston Conservatory Piano Masters Series and has mentored many prize-winning pianists. He is a Juilliard School graduate and a Steinway Artist. His own teachers includedLeon Fleisher, Yvonne Lefebure, Adele Marcus and Irwin Freundlich.
www.michaellewin.com
Pianist Wayman Chin has performed throughout the United States, Asia, the United Kingdom and Latin America, at Princeton University, the Curtis Institute of Music, the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Old First Concert Series in San Francisco and in the Far East at Tsuen Wan Town Hall in Hong Kong, at the residence of the US Ambassador in Manila, and at Soochow University in Taipei. Most recently, he performed at the National Museum of Music in Havana and at La Misíon Performing Arts Center in Mexico. His playing has been described as, “transcendental, long lines spun like glorious gold thread,” “ferociously concentrated, intense, focused, and musically astute” (Boston Herald), “vividly characterized and atmospheric,” (Stamford Mercury, U.K.) and “sheer magic….every note is colored.”(the Freeman, Philippines).
Wayman Chin has premiered works by noted composers Scott Wheeler, Marti Epstein, Meyer Kupferman, and Paul Brust and introduced several works of Aaron Jay Kernis to Boston audiences. Of Chin’s performance of Kernis’ Valentines, 21st Century Music wrote, “Wayman Chin traversed the formidable challenges of the piano part with conspicuous success. His highly demonstrative performing style excellently suited the work’s forthright nature.”
A committed teacher, Wayman Chin has been a member of the faculty since 1994 at the Longy School of Music of Bard College, where he was awarded the George Seaman Award for Excellence in the Art of Teaching. At Longy, he also served as Dean of the Conservatory for twelve years and in 2020 was named Dean Emeritus.
Mr. Chin earned a Bachelor of Music degree with honors from the University of Hartford’s Hartt School and a Master of Music degree from Yale University. His principal teachers and mentors were Anne Koscielny, Joan Panetti, Donald Currier, and Raymond Hanson. He has given master classes in Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines. Canada and the United Kingdom. He has also served on the juries of the CS Music International Piano Competition in Guangzhou, China and the Boston International Piano Competition and most recently, judged the chamber music competition at the Glenn Gould School in Toronto.
Praised for her “thrilling, inspirational performance” (Florida Sun-Sentinel) and “elegance of line, leaping energy” (San Jose Mercury News), pianist Yukiko Sekino has forged a career that encompasses a wide range of interests. A soloist noted for her performances of Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and Scriabin, she frequently collaborates in chamber music and performs some of the most challenging twentieth and twenty-first century works.
Sekino is the Gold Medalist of the 2006 International Russian Music Piano Competition and a 2010 winner of the S&R Foundation’s Washington Award. As the winner of the Mu Phi Epsilon International Competition, she has toured within the United States in recitals, masterclasses, and concerto performances. Additional honors include Tanglewood Music Center’s Jackson Prize and the JAA Music Award in New York. She made a concerto debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at age sixteen, and has since performed with the New World Symphony, Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra. Recent recitals include those at Jordan Hall in Boston, Overtures Series in Washington, D.C., Dame Myra Hess Concerts in Chicago, Hitomi Memorial Hall in Tokyo, Japan, and Northeast Asia International Piano Festival in China.
An avid collaborative artist and a new music performer, Sekino was the pianist of the New World Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas from 2005 to 2008.
Sekino is a graduate of Harvard University and the Juilliard School. Her teachers include Gilbert Kalish, Seymour Lipkin, Robert Levin, and Eda Shlyam. Currently based in Boston, she teaches piano at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the New England Conservatory Prep School. She has given masterclasses in the United States and China, and has served as a summer guest artist and faculty at East Carolina Piano Festival and Atlantic Music Festival.
Italian pianist Roberto Poli has appeared as a soloist, harpsichordist, chamber musician and conductor around the world in cities such as Boston, Brussels, Paris, San Salvador, Calgary, Dublin, New York, Rome, Tokyo, Vilnius, Zurich, and Seoul. In Italy, Mr. Poli studied with Giorgio Vianello at the Venice Conservatory, and with Boris Petrushansky at the Accademia Pianistica in Imola. After moving to the United States in 1998, he received a Master’s Degree and Artist Diploma from New England Conservatory of Music under the guidance of Russell Sherman.
The music of Chopin, which Mr. Poli has studied through manuscripts and original editions, is the center of his interest as a pianist and scholar, from the recording of the composer’s complete works to the organization of the Chopin Symposia to the publication of his first book on interpretation, "The Secret Life of Musical Notation (Amadeus Press, 2010, now published by Rowan & Littlefield). His second book, "It's about Time: traveling diary of an itinerant pianist" (Pianopolis, 2018) is intended as a sequel to his first book: concepts such as time, rubato, rhythmic values, pulse, meter, timekeeping, musicality, and interpretation are analyzed through the eyes of both the historical musician/listener and its modern counterpart.
Roberto Poli's debut CD "Shall We Dance..." was released on Americus Records in 2002. An all-Liszt album was presented in 2012 by Onclassical, a European label which also releases his recording of the complete works of Chopin, now at its sixth volume. In addition to his recording activity, Roberto Poli is an enthusiastic sought-after teacher and lecturer. He holds positions at New England Conservatory and Boston Conservatory at Berklee. From 1999 to 2016, he was Artist in Residence and Chair of the Piano Department at The Rivers School Conservatory in Weston, Massachusetts. Additionally, Mr. Poli enjoys a busy schedule of master classes, and has been a guest lecturer and keynote speaker for the National Music Teachers Association and at institutions such as Cornell University, Dartmouth College, New England Conservatory of Music, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, and the University of Virginia.
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Praised by the New York Times for her “passionate and insightful” playing, Renana Gutman has performed across four continents as an orchestral soloist, recitalist and collaborative artist. She played at venues like The Louvre Museum, Grenoble Museum (France), Carnegie Recital Hall, People’s Symphony Concerts, Merkin Hall (New York), St. Petersburg’s Philharmonia (Russia), Stresa Music Festival (Italy), Ravinia Rising Stars (Chicago), Jordan Hall, Gardner Museum (Boston), Herbst Theatre (St. Francisco), Menuhin Hall (UK), UNISA (South Africa), Marlboro (VT), and National Gallery, Phillips Collection, and Freer Gallery (Washington DC). Her performances are heard frequently on WQXR Young Artists Showcase, NY, WFMT Dame Myra Hess, Chicago, and MPR in Performances Today, MN.
Renana was one of four young pianists selected by the renowned Leon Fleisher to participate in his workshop on Beethoven piano sonatas hosted by Carnegie Hall, where she presented performances of “Hammerklavier” and “Appassionata” to critical acclaim. Her recording of Chopin etudes op.25 will be released soon by “The Chopin Project” – listen here.
A top prize winner at Los Angeles Liszt competition, International Keyboard Festival in New York, and Tel-Hai International Master Classes, she performed concerti such as Brahms 2nd, Rachmaninoff-Paganini Variations, and Beethoven’s “Emperor” with the Jerusalem Symphony, Haifa Symphony, Belgian “I Fiamminghi”, and Mannes College Orchestra. Her festival appearances included Marlboro and Ravinia, where she collaborated with prominent musicians like pianist Richard Goode, clarinetist Anthony McGill and members of the Guarneri string quartet, to name a few.
Renana joined the piano faculty of Boston’s Longy School of Music of Bard College in the fall of 2019. She had previously been on the piano faculty of the Yehudi Menuhin Music School in the UK. Renana became an American citizen in 2015 and makes her home in Boston, MA. She also pursues her passion for Argentinian Tango, languages, and poetry.
https://renanagutman.com